Association for Computing Machinery attracts over 500 students at its fall kickoff

By Daniel Li

More than 500 students showed up for ACM's Fall Kickoff.
Photos courtesy of ACM

This year, a new student organization has been rapidly gaining momentum at UC San Diego: the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). 

ACM’s Fall Kickoff, which was held on Sept. 29 at Price Center East Ballroom, attracted a whopping 500 students, with the line spanning from the ballroom entrance to Library Walk. In the first month since its launch, the club has also hosted over 15 professional and social events. 

According to founder and president Antony Nguyen, a fourth-year computer engineering student, ACM is an international organization for computing catered towards engineers, designers and entrepreneurs. Just last week, the club introduced “Hack School,” a workshop series aimed to teach students the basics of Full Stack Web Development. 

“Our events are geared towards the field of computing and there's so many different areas we hope to explore, including software engineering, as well as mobile app, web and game development,” Nguyen said. “We also host a variety of social events to build a community so that everyone can get to know each other.”

He got the inspiration to start ACM at UC San Diego in January 2019 after stumbling upon UCLA’s chapter, which started four years ago and boasts a membership of over 1000 people. In the subsequent months, Nguyen and several friends teamed up to start a chapter at UC San Diego. 

Before launching the club, the group met over the summer to think of ways to differentiate ACM from the abundance of engineering organizations on campus; one important aspect was how to define membership. 

Students on the ACM leadership board rep the group and its
signature diamond logo. 

“I remember as a first- and second-year student, I joined some clubs and people would ask me ‘Are you part of this club?” Nguyen said. “And this was hard for me to answer because I just show up to events and many clubs really don’t define what it means to be a member.”

Vice President of Membership Kendall Nakai, a second-year computer engineering student, explained that the chapter prides itself on being member-centric and has a membership portal where students can track their progress within the organization.

“We wanted members to have a way to know how far they’ve come in the organization,” Nakai said. “By showing up to events, members can get incentives, such as priority access to networking events. I think it’s important to reward the people who consistently show up to all events.”

Unlike most student organizations, which use Slack as their main method of communication, ACM adopted Discord, a text-messaging platform popular in the gaming community. Nguyen said that this choice was deliberate, as the club hopes to develop more personal connections with its members. 

“Discord is a big reason for our success,” Nguyen said.  “By summer we had over 100 incoming first-years who hadn't even started school on our Discord. Nowadays, the discord is used on a daily basis; people play games with each other, give career advice and just talk about life.” 

Nguyen also attributes the large turnout to the club’s advertising efforts. The team branded itself as part of “the largest computing organization in the world” and distributed flyers across campus. He added that having the entire executive board well-connected within the engineering community gave them a tremendous advantage. 

ACM members on a hike just blocks away from campus.

“Having connections before starting your organization is extremely important,” Nguyen said. “The moment we launched our kickoff, we sent personal invitations to our event page on Facebook. It's like a giant chain effect; people start pressing ‘going,’ and then their friends on Facebook will see it too.”

Nguyen stressed the main benefit of ACM is that it’s tied to an international organization, introducing students to a large, diverse network of people. 

“Having a strong network is what gets you jobs at companies, big or small,” Nguyen said. “We can give students connections that otherwise might be harder to get from other clubs.”